Friday, June 6, 2014

I Present to You: The Yellowhead Jawfish

Shannon, my wife, and I have made it a little tradition to visit a Zoo or Aquarium and an Ikea on our wedding anniversary. We do this because it is a refining process for our relationship. The trip tests the metal of our union because every minute that I spend in Ikea is a minute I am not spending in the Zoo, and every minute we spend in the Zoo is a minute that Shannon isn't in Ikea. While the impressive array of flat crate furniture at discount prices is fun for the first hour, no amount of Swedish meatballs and lingonberry juice can equate to the sheer joy I experience whilst gazing at lazy walruses.

We switched things up a little this year and hit up Ikea first. The most disappointing part of that trip was realizing I couldn't afford the doll beds that seamlessly turn into adorable cat beds. The highlight was that I bought a second long handled shoe-horn, which is one of the greatest inventions known to man, because it saves your fingers from turning into flesh jam when you try to squeeze your heel into a shoe that already has it's laces tied. Also, we bought a hedgehog.

15 meatballs and a new entry bench later we were on our way to The Point Defiance Zoo and Aquarium. The Zoo/Aquarium combo was pretty neat, neither one was very large, but I did get to pet a Millipede, which was alright. The real treat came while I was perusing the small aquarium (alone, I might add. My lovely wife has a crippling fear of being under water and of sharks.) and I came across a small tank containing a fish that looked like it was strait out of Spongebob. The thing looked like it was standing upright when it held still and used it's mouth as shovel to dig holes in the sand. It would swim over to a mound of sand, take a large mouthful, swim a ways away and seemingly belch it out. It was fantastic. I took a little video and turned it into a gif for you guys!...You're welcome.

Anyway, this little guy stems from the Caribbean and- you know, you can just check out the wikipedia page if you're actually interested, I'm not going to sit here and type the article to you, I just wanted to show you a fish that eats sand and then throws it up!

*Side note: Shannon is the greatest woman in the world, and I don't mind going to Ikea with her; It's just that sometimes it takes a long time, and you can only look at shelving brackets for so long before you snap.